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by Beren Van Daele
When I tell people that I'm a tester, a lot of the time they ask me why I'm not bored of doing the same thing over and over again. Why are you still in manual testing, they ask me. That's the "Testing is constantly doing the same thing over and over again." mentality.
I am not bored
The reason I'm not bored, is because testing isn't repetitive at all. Some things about testing are, sure.
But most of the time, it's a challenging investigation in an ever changing context.
I love tinkering with a product, trying to find patterns, or trying to break them, forming a theory and then trying to put it in practice. I notice things. I spot what's out of the ordinary.
It's exactly in this manner that I found an interesting bug: I had noticed that the application was slowing down just a wee little bit the longer I was testing but sometimes it didn't...
I wouldn't call myself a technical person, but I won't shy away from it either. Therefore I didn't immediately think of different reasons that this behaviour came to be, but I did think of different ways to test it.
One of these involved the Selenium IDE.
Record, play, throw away
Selenium IDE is a very easy to use, easily installable add-on for FireFox and pretty useful, sometimes. It's the 'record and play' tool of early Selenium. Most of these type of tools forget the third part in their name though. 'Record, play and throw away' which describes them much better and furthermore has a nice rhyme in it (which further proves my point).
I used the IDE to record a few frequently used steps in my testing. Execute a query, consult a record detail and move to the next record.
Next thing I did was create a script that repeated each of these steps in sequence and another few scripts to have the steps repeat separately.
A few copy-pastes later, I fired up the browser, pressed F12 for the developer tools, clicked play and went for coffee.
The script ran for longer than it took me to finish my coffee, but the beauty of selenium is that it can run in the background, so I was able to get some other work done.
On the 136'th time of the "go to next record"-repeat script, the application client froze up which was a result from a memory overload: The cache had filled up.
Automation doesn't need to be a regression checklist. A quick script that's easily thrown away but which creates important test data, or executes repetitive steps so that you are free to find interesting new information are just as good a use of automation.
About Beren Van Daele
I'm a software tester from Belgium who helps shape teams and testers to improve on their work and their understanding of testing. I'm an organizer of BREWT: the Belgian Peer conference & a test meetup in his hometown: Gent. The creative brain behind Test Sphere and speaker at Test Bash Manchester and Eurostar 2016. My dream is to become a test coach for people that nobody believes in anymore or no longer believe in themselves. People that have motivation and will, but no luck. I want to tap into that potential and give them the opportunity to become awesome tester.
